Protecting its employees and preventing work-based accidents is top of the agenda for Evonik. One of the world’s leading speciality chemicals company, they create innovative and sustainable solutions that can be found in hundreds of everyday products - from mattresses to medications.
Evonik has expanded significantly in recent years through both organic growth and mergers and acquisitions. As a result, its environment, safety, health, and quality (ESHQ) processes and tools had become fragmented.
With operations in more than 100 countries, the company wanted to take a unified approach to ESHQ to not only enhance transparency and efficiency but also drive better outcomes.
Evonik recognized ERM’s expertise with systems integration and coupled with EHSQ domain experience and a team that could support them globally, we worked together to implement a new digital platform founded on Intelex’s cloud-based solution.
Simplifying and standardizing ESHQ across the globe
To fully understand Evonik’s requirements for the new platform, ERM ran a series of design workshops to define the processes and workflows that would underpin the first phase of the project, which included introducing new modules for incident management, change management, hazard assessment, and legal compliance. The approach being to stay as close to the standard application as possible and only do configuration where needed to make it applicable to Evonik.
ERM then configured the Intelex solution to meet the defined requirements, supported Evonik in performing Quality Assurance and then embarked on a program of training and knowledge transfer working closely with the core Evonik team to support roll out first to a series of early adopter sites and then globally using lessons learnt from the early adopters.
The digital platform, called ESTER, (short for Evonik Standard Tool for EHSQ & Reporting) has been deployed globally and translated into 17 languages. It has enabled the retirement of multiple localised legacy systems, which will help to reduce the cost and complexity associated with managing ESHQ across a global organization and workforce and support the development of a common ESHQ culture across Evonik.
ESTER isn’t just an ESHQ software project; it was a culture change. It’s been great to see the number of culture change agents grow across our company. Together, we can influence a change for the better.
Richer safety performance data driving better outcomes
Thanks to ESTER, the company’s 36,000 employees will have a unified platform and a standardized process for reporting incidents, which will improve transparency and reinforce a global EHSQ culture. Rollout is in full force. They have already realized significant cost savings in being able to eliminate over 100 legacy IT tools.
With faster and easier access to key performance indicators, Evonik will be able to drive better outcomes for employees around the world. The new platform will also unlock new insights into safety performance, which will help inform ongoing improvements.
In March 2020, Evonik was recognized with an Operational Excellence Innovation Award from Verdantix. The award highlighted their approach in which they efficiently and effectively executed the global deployment of Intelex’s EHS software to manage EHS and operational risk at a global level.
